M1rock's Question and Suggestion Thread for A clean Gameex setup.

[m1rock]

Well Im rebuilding my mame cabinet with a better PC after my original one was on a laptop and not very reliable.  I decided to start from scratch because I learned allot on the first one and the second time around I am trying to do a much cleaner setup.  My one issue though is getting multiple versions of mame to work with gameex.  I understand you got your main mame in gameex and if you want to add a different version of mame you set it up in emulators.  But there are several problems with that.  No icons, rom names show up as game names and no way to change it, having to manually edit in information.   Can someone help me out and point me to a good resource that will allow me to run multiple versions of mame without having to set one up as an emu?  Perhaps one that isnt written in a way that assumes Ive done this before and therefore leaves out steps?  Any help would be much appreciated.  

[B2K24]

The easiest way I believe would be to have your different MAME's working outside of GameEX. Then depending on which one you want to run just change the mame paths and executable name in the setup wizard before launching GameEX.

I don't believe there's an efficient way of having multiple versions hooked up at once that take advantage of GameEX main mame functionality unfortunately.

 

 

[m1rock]

 Thanks for the response, but I kinda want a clean setup where when friends come over they can just walk up to the cabinet and find their favorite game to play and not have to manually change file path locations names.  It seems odd that this would not be a feature in Gameex as one of its main purposes is to create a streamline front end to run all your emulators.  And as we know one of the biggest challenges with MAME is that every release seems to fix or improve several games while breaking several more.   It just kinda seems like a common sense feature that should be included. Any info on how to change the names?   Im guessing I got to create a database file somehow and then associate it with my MAME that is in my emulator list.  Again thanks! 

[Kustom Kid]

This would make for a great feature request.

[Draco1962]

There is a feature that allows you to setup separate GameEx logins so you could keep one setup with your default locations, but each friend could login and select their own favorites. Not quite what you are asking for but an option none the less. 

[m1rock]

Thank you for all the replies.   I was able to figure out how map files work so I have that going on at least.  I can make due with setting other versions of MAME as emulators and then creating a group and fixing the names in MAP.  But it would be a great feature to be able to simply add more than one MAME exe and more than one ROM path to the main gameex install.   I think allot of really good themes get unused because of this because many of them focus on only running a base MAME.   I had to wade through several till I found one that worked great with my unconventional setup.  Is there a way I can request a feature like that?  A certain email address?   Right now im struggling with videos and might make another topic if I cant figure it out.  My old FLV files dont want to play in gameex but the MP4 ones I download to emu movies work just fine.  Tried shark 007 codecs and its seemed to cause more problems then solved so I uninstalled it. Those codecs have malware in them by the way so I kinda think its a bad idea to have them linked to in the Gameex setup.  Maybe because I got VLC installed, maybe my codecs are wrong or maybe my files are just corrupt.  Tried converting the FLV to MP4 and the play fine on my PC but Gameex doesnt like them for some reason.   Im going to change the title of this thread as a general help thread for my project and people can respond if they know the answer and want to help out.  All help or suggestions are appreciated and thanks for being a great community! 

[Draco1962]

Feature requests can be made in this thread. As for the codecs issue, I suggest the LAV codecs. Smaller footprint and great results. I run VLC and haven't ahd any of the problems you describe, so try LAV and maybe look at replacing your FLV files with MP4 as it sounds like you may have some bad files.

[m1rock]

Thanks Draco, I will check this out and then report back.  And for those new that need help figuring out map file here is all you have to do to change the name of your MAME file in Gameex.  For an example we will take Pac Man.  So first you take a notepad file and you copy all the file names of all the MAME roms you want to name change.  And you only got to do the ones you want to show up in your list. So if you got to get Puck Man to get the file to work and you got the Midway Pac Man  rom as well then you just got to type in the notepad the rom name | and what you want to name it.   So install both Puckman and Pacman in your mame rom folder and then put pacman|Pac-Man Do this for every rom you want to show up in gameex under that certian emulator and save it to C: Gameex Data emulators and give it a name like [Arcade] MAME.mdb and make sure to turn on file extensions in Windows so you can change it from .txt to .mdb.  then go into your advanced emulator settings and set the map directory to the .mdb file you just created!   Figured id offer some advice to now Gameex enthusiasts since I didn't find it described that easy when I was looking myself.

[nullPointer]

Just a quick note regarding FLV video files.  These are (IMO) an unfortunate relic of older front ends that relied heavily on FLV videos for playback.  My advice would be to use a video conversion tool to convert them into a more modern flexible format.  A tool like Convert-It or Handbrake can be used for batch conversion of videos at which point you no longer have to worry about legacy and/or mixed formats anymore.

[m1rock]

I feel like a total noob but I cant seem to figure out how to respond to the Suggestion thread like I can on my thread.  There is no post reply section on the bottom of the page.   I was also thinking about adding a suggestion of having CRT shaders built into gameex.  I think that would be really cool.  Especially for my Atari 2600.   As far as my videos Im just getting new ones in MP4 format instead of FLV and so far so good.   I wish I knew of an easy way to give my display a CRT like effect but so far everything I have come across has been waaay to advanced for me and extremely time consuming.   I know some individual emulators have those settings but it would be nice to have a universal one I could set up for the sake of consistency.   I know regret getting a cabinet kit that only allowed for a flat screen and wish I would have found one with a CRT monitor.  sigh.